Date:07/09/2008 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2008/09/07/stories/2008090754511500.htm

Sport - Tennis

A deserving win for Peter Gojowczyk

Sports Reporter

— Photo: S.S. Kumar

Peter Gojowczyk.

CHENNAI: In the blast furnace that Court-2 at Gandhinagar Club here is wont to resemble, top-seeded German Peter Gojowczyk forged a deserved victory over a perpetually disgruntled Alexey Kedryuk in the final of the ITF Futures tournament on Saturday. While the victor swelled his ATP points tally by 18, the vanquished pocketed 12 points.

A decisive tie-break seemed imminent at the very outset with big serves being the order of the day and neither player managing to lay hands on that elusive break in the first set. Indeed, the longest rally of the opener amounted to all of five shots and that too in the eleventh game. The tie-break, too, began on a similar note — 3-3 with both players unwilling to blink — before Gojowczyk’s backhand pass sailed over the baseline to hand Kedryuk the first mini-break. Underlining his top-seed status, the German staved off two set-points — one with a huge wide serve — and then drove second-seed Kedryuk to desperation with some lusty hitting down the line to win the tie-break.

At loggerheads

Constantly at loggerheads with the chair umpire, Kedryuk lost the plot in the second set while his strawberry blonde adversary displayed a progressively menacing game in direct contrast to his choir-boy looks. Gojowczyk slid and lunged to a 2-0 lead and then faced his first break point at 30-40 in the third game.

Now in cruise control, he slammed two aces and a service winner to win the game and then broke Kedryuk again for a comfort 4-0 lead, a margin he stretched to 5-0 after holding his serve at love in the next game.

It was all over then but for the shouting, as Kedryuk managed to annex a game to register his presence in the second set and Gojowczyk held serve to end the Kazakh’s ordeal 6-1 in the second. “It was very difficult to return serve, more so because the court was a little slippery. I was somewhat wary of unknown Indian players at the start of the tourney, but gained momentum once the initial rounds got over,” said Gojowczyk later.

The result: Men’s final: Peter Gojowczyk bt Alexey Kedryuk 7-6(8), 6-1.